The Visiting Privilege (16 page)

Tommy said, “If you don't feel safe here, we'll move. I've been looking at a wonderful place about twenty miles from here, on a cove. It only needs a little work. It will give us more room. There's a barn, some fence. Martha could have a horse.”

Sarah looked at him with an intent, halted expression, as though she were listening to a dialogue no one present was engaged in. Finally, she said, “There are robbers. Everything has changed.”

W
hen I was very small, my father said, “Lizzie, I want to tell you something about your grandfather. Just before he died, he was alive. Fifteen minutes before.”

I had never known my grandfather. This was the most extraordinary thing I had ever heard about him.

Still, I said, No.

“No!” my father said. “What do you mean, ‘No.' ” He laughed.

I shook my head.

“All right,” my father said, “it was one minute before. I thought you were too little to know such things, but I see you're not. It was even less than a minute. It was one
moment
before.”

“Oh, stop teasing her,” my mother said to my father.

“He's just teasing you, Lizzie,” my mother said.

In warm weather once we drove up into the mountains, my mother, my father and I, and stayed for several days at a resort lodge on a lake. In the afternoons, horse races took place in the lodge. The horses were blocks of wood with numbers painted on them, moved from one end of the room to the other by ladies in ball gowns. There was a long pier that led out into the lake and at the end of the pier was a nightclub that had a twenty-foot-tall champagne glass on the roof. At night, someone would pull a switch and neon bubbles would spring out from the lit glass into the black air. I very much wanted such a glass on the roof of our own house and I wanted to be the one who, every night, would turn on the switch. My mother always said about this, “We'll see.”

I saw an odd thing once, there in the mountains. I saw my father pretending to be lame. This was in the midst of strangers in the gift shop of the lodge. The shop sold hand-carved canes, among many other things, and when I came in to buy bubble gum in the shape of cigarettes, to which I was devoted, I saw my father hobbling painfully down the aisle, leaning heavily on a dully gleaming yellow cane, his shoulders hunched, one leg turned out at a curious angle. My handsome, healthy father, his face drawn in dreams. He looked at me. And then he looked away as though he did not know me.

My mother was a drinker. Because my father left us, I assumed he was not a drinker, but this may not have been the case. My mother loved me and was always kind to me. We spent a great deal of time together, my mother and I. This was before I knew how to read. I suspected there was a trick to reading, but I did not know the trick. Written words were something between me and a place I could not go. My mother went back and forth to that place all the time, but couldn't explain to me exactly what it was like there. I imagined it to be a different place.

As a very young child, my mother had seen the magician Houdini. Houdini had made an elephant disappear. He had also made an orange tree grow from a seed right on the stage. Bright oranges hung from the tree and he had picked them and thrown them out into the audience. People could eat the oranges or take them home, whatever they wanted.

“How did he make the elephant disappear,” I asked.

“He disappeared in a puff of smoke,” my mother said. “Houdini said that even the elephant didn't know how it was done.”

“Was it a baby elephant,” I asked.

My mother sipped her drink. She said that Houdini was more than a magician, he was an escape artist. She said that he could escape from handcuffs and chains and ropes.

“They put him in straitjackets and locked him in trunks and threw him in swimming pools and rivers and oceans and he escaped,” my mother said. “He escaped from water-filled vaults. He escaped from coffins.”

I said that I wanted to see Houdini.

“Oh, Houdini's dead, Lizzie,” my mother said. “He died a long time ago. A man punched him in the stomach three times and he died.”

Dead. I asked if he couldn't get out of being dead.

“He met his match there,” my mother said.

She said that he turned a bowl of flowers into a pony who cantered around the stage.

“He sawed a lady in half too, Lizzie.” Oh, how I wanted to be that lady, sawed in half and then made whole again!

My mother spoke happily, laughing. We sat at the kitchen table and my mother was drinking from a small glass that rested snugly in her hand. It was my favorite glass too but she never let me drink from it. There were all kinds of glasses in our cupboard but this was the one we both liked. This was in Maine. Outside, in the yard, was our car, which was an old blue convertible.

“Was there blood,” I asked.

“No, Lizzie, no. He was a magician!”

“Did she cry, that lady,” I wanted to know.

“I don't think so,” my mother said. “Maybe he hypnotized her first.”

It was winter. My father had never ridden in the blue convertible, which my mother had bought after he had gone. The car was old then, and was rusted here and there. Beneath the rubber mat on my side, the passenger side, part of the floor had rusted through completely. When we went anywhere in the car, I would sometimes lift up the mat so I could see the road rushing past beneath us and feel the cold round air as it came up through the hole. I would pretend that the coldness was trying to speak to me, in the same way that words written down tried to speak. The air wanted to tell me something, but I didn't care about it, that's what I thought. Outside, the car stood in the snow.

I had a dream about the car. My mother and I were alone together as we always were, linked in our hopeless and uncomprehending love of each other, and we were driving to a house. It seemed to be our destination but we arrived only to move on. We drove again, always returning to the house, which we would circle and leave, only to arrive at it again. As we drove, the inside of the car grew hair. The hair was gray and it grew and grew. I never told my mother about this dream just as I had never told her about my father leaning on the cane. I was a secretive person. In that way, I was like my mother.

I wanted to know more about Houdini. “Was Houdini in love,” I asked. “Did he love someone?”

“Bess,” my mother said. “He loved his wife, Bess.”

I went and got a glass and poured some ginger ale in it and I sipped my ginger ale as slowly as I had seen my mother sip her drink many, many times. Even then, I had the gestures down. I sat opposite her, very still and quiet, pretending.

But then I wanted to know if there was magic in the way he loved her. Could he make her disappear. Could he make both of them disappear, was the way I put my question.

“No one knew anything about Bess except that Houdini loved her,” my mother said. “He never turned their love into loneliness, which would have been beneath him of course.”

We ate our supper and after supper my mother would have another little bit to drink. Then she would read articles from the newspaper aloud to me.

“My goodness,” she said, “what a strange story. A hunter shot a bear who was carrying a woman's pocketbook in its mouth.”

“Oh, oh,” I cried. I looked at the newspaper and struck it with my fingers. My mother read on, a little oblivious to me. The woman had lost her purse years before on a camping trip. Everything was still inside it, her wallet and her compact and her keys.

“Oh,” I cried. I thought this was terrible. I was frightened, thinking of my mother's pocketbook, how she always carried it always, and the poor bear too.

“Why did the bear want to carry a pocketbook,” I asked.

My mother looked up from the words in the newspaper. It was as though she had come back into the room I was in.

“Why, Lizzie,” she said.

“The poor bear,” I said.

“Oh, the bear is all right,” my mother said. “The bear got away.”

I did not believe this was the case. She herself said the bear had been shot.

“The bear escaped,” my mother said. “It says so right here,” and she ran her finger along a line of words. “It ran back into the woods to its home.” She stood up and came around the table and kissed me. She smelled then like the glass that was always in the sink in the morning, and the smell reminds me still of daring and deception, hopes and little lies.

I shut my eyes and felt I could not hear my mother. I saw the bear holding the pocketbook, walking through the woods with it, feeling fine and different and pretty too, then stopping to find something in it, wanting something, moving its big paw through the pocketbook's small things.

“Lizzie,” my mother called to me. My mother did not know where I was, which alarmed me. I opened my eyes.

“Don't cry, Lizzie,” my mother said. She looked as though she were about to cry too. This was how it often was at night, late in the kitchen, with my mother.

My mother returned to the newspaper and began to turn the pages. She called my attention to the drawing of a man holding a hat with stars sprinkling out of it. It was an advertisement for a magician who would be performing not far away. We decided we would see him. My mother knew just the seats she wanted for us, good seats, on the aisle, close to the stage. We might be called up on the stage, she said, to be part of the performance. Magicians often used people from the audience, particularly children. I might even be given a rabbit.

I wanted a rabbit.

I put my hands on the table and I could see the rabbit between them. He was solid white in the front and solid black in the back as though he were made up of two rabbits. There are rabbits like that. I saw him there, before me on the table, a nice rabbit.

My mother went to the phone and ordered two tickets, and not many days after that, we were in our car driving to Portland for the matinee performance. I very much liked the word
matinee.
Matinee, matinee, I said. There was a broad hump on the floor between our seats and it was here where my mother put her little glass, the glass often full, never, it seemed, more than half empty. We chatted together and I thought we must have appeared interesting to others as we passed by in our convertible in winter. My mother spoke about happiness. She told me that the happiness that comes out of nowhere, out of nothing, is the very best kind. We paid no attention to the coldness, which was speaking in the way that it had, but enjoyed the sun beating through the windshield on our pale hands.

My mother said that Houdini had black eyes and that white doves flew from his fingertips. She said that he escaped from a block of ice.

“Did he look like my father, Houdini,” I asked. “Did he have a mustache.”

“Your father didn't have a mustache,” my mother said, laughing. “Oh, I wish I could be more like you.”

Later, she said, “Maybe he didn't escape from a block of ice, I'm not sure about that. Maybe he wanted to, but he never did.”

We stopped for lunch somewhere, a dark little restaurant along the road. My mother had cocktails and I myself drank something cold and sweet. The restaurant was not very nice. It smelled of smoke and dampness as though once it had burned down, and it was so noisy that I could not hear my mother very well. My mother looked like a woman in a bar, pretty and disturbed, hunched forward saying, Who do you think I look like, will you remember me? She was saying all manner of things. We lingered there, and then my mother asked the time of someone and seemed surprised. My mother was always surprised by time. Outside, there were woods of green fir trees, whose lowest branches swept the ground, and as we were getting back into the car, I believed I saw something moving far back in the darkness of the woods beyond the slick, snowy square of the parking lot. It was the bear, I thought. Hurry, hurry, I thought. The hunter is playing with his children. He is making them something to play in as my father had once made a small playhouse for me. He is not the hunter yet. But in my heart I knew the bear was gone and the shape was just the shadow of something else in the afternoon.

My mother drove very fast but the performance had already begun when we arrived. My mother's face was damp and her good blouse had a spot on it. She went into the ladies' room and when she returned the spot was larger, but it was water now and not what it had been before. The usher assured us that we had not missed much. The usher said that the magician was not very good, that he talked and talked, he told a lot of jokes and then when you were bored and distracted, something would happen, something would have changed. The usher smiled at my mother. He seemed to like her, even know her in some way. He was a small man, like an old boy, balding. I did not care for him. He led us to our seats, but there were people sitting in them and there was a small disturbance as the strangers rearranged themselves. We were both expectant, my mother and I, and we watched the magician intently. My mother's lips were parted, and her eyes were bright. On the stage were a group of children about my age, each with a hand on a small cage the magician was holding. In the cage was a tiny bird. The magician would ask the children to jostle the cage occasionally and the bird would flutter against the bars so that everyone would see it was a real thing with bones and breath and feelings too. Each child announced that they had a firm grip on the bars. Then the magician put a cloth over the cage, gave a quick tug and both cage and bird vanished. I was not surprised. It seemed just the kind of thing that was going to happen. I decided to withhold my applause when I saw that my mother's hands too were in her lap. There were several more tricks of the magician's invention, certainly nothing I would have asked him to do. Large constructions of many parts and colors were wheeled onto the stage. There were doors everywhere that the magician opened and slammed shut. Things came and went, all to the accompaniment of loud music. I was confused and grew hot. My mother too moved restlessly in the next seat. Then there was an intermission and we returned to the lobby.

“This man is a far, far cry from the great Houdini,” my mother said.

“What were his intentions, exactly,” I asked.

He had taken a watch from a man in the audience and smashed it for all to see with a hammer. Then the watch, unharmed, had reappeared behind the man's ear.